


Off the Record (Off the Map)

by riko



Category: Iron Man (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:54:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riko/pseuds/riko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pepper has already walked many miles in Tony Stark's shoes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Off the Record (Off the Map)

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly written to try to get a feel for the characters, but I cannot say no to Midwestern antics, so.

The car sputters once they're out of easy walking distance from anywhere, walled in on either side by rows of corn, with only blue sky ahead and blue sky behind. If Pepper didn't know any better, she'd think it was consciously waiting for the most inopportune time to break down, just to be spiteful. Then she thinks about half the machines Tony Stark has built in his life and decides that spite is probably not out of the question.

If Tony noticed the hitch and the roll of choking noises, he doesn't show it, eyes locked on the screen of his laptop. Pepper watches him, waiting to see if this is purposeful nonchalance or simply Tony so zoned out that he doesn't notice things like time or weather or cars breaking down; it can be hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes. When a full minute passes without a snide observation, Pepper turns in her seat, looks over her shoulder, and catches Happy's eye in the rear-view mirror. He raises his eyebrows, _Should I stop, Ms. Potts?_, and she shakes her head once, a determined swish from side-to-side, _Drive on, drive on_.

They get a mile and a half farther before the choking noise starts again. Smoke starts to curl up from the engine, and Happy doesn't ask permission this time. He knocks the four-way flashers on and pulls over. When he swears under his breath and gets out of the car, Pepper turns her attention back to Tony who has not looked up and is now drumming his fingers on the edge of his laptop, right below the touchpad.

"I need a word for this that is not 'amazing,'" he says. "I don't want it to sound like we just stumbled on this technology by accident, and ooh, _amazing_."

"Marvelous," says Pepper. "Fantastic, prodigious. Wondrous?"

Tony replies with a "hmf" and a frown. He clacks at a few keys, stares at the screen with an expression of utter disgust, and then presses the backspace button repeatedly. Faintly, Pepper can hear the sound of the hood being lifted, and Happy poking around in the engine and then swearing loudly, twice.

"I'm trying to find a nicer way to say 'You're all incompetent, but I guess there was a good reason I didn't fire you years ago,'" explains Tony eventually.

Pepper shifts in her seat. Her right foot is going numb. "Nicer than 'I should have fired you years ago'? That's a hard one."

"Yeah," says Tony. "I mean, I'll probably say it anyway, but we shouldn't put it in writing, should we, Ms. Potts?"

Pepper thinks about the last libel suit they only barely won and agrees that this is probably a good idea.

Outside, the hood comes down with a bang, followed by the sounds of Happy's heavy footsteps scattering pebbles on the road as he walks back to the driver's seat. Pepper keeps her eyes on Tony, waiting for the moment when he finally looks up. It takes Happy shutting the door and trying the ignition again for it to happen but then his eyes shoot up and shift from one side to other, like he's surprised to see that the landscape has stopped moving past the right window but he needs to check the left one as well, just for confirmation.

"We're not moving," he says in the tone of voice he uses when something is not going as planned. It's vaguely irritated but mostly bewildered.

"Yes," says Pepper.

"We are actually completely motionless right now."

"Yes," says Pepper.

Tony blinks and rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. "_Why?_"

Happy fields this one, ducking his head into the back. "Sorry, Mr. Stark. We've got engine trouble or something. Completely beyond me, whatever it is, so I don't suppose you'd...?"

The question hangs there, unanswered, but Tony is already wiggling out of his suit jacket, and that's answer enough. He leaves the jacket strewn across his laptop's keyboard and pulls his tie over his head, causing bits of hair to fall astray across his forehead. He doesn't even bother to undo the knot before that joins the pile as well.

When he and Happy have scrambled out of the car – and it is a scramble, no mistake, with Tony grinning broadly at the prospect of fiddling with an engine – Pepper takes a moment to smooth out his jacket and tie and leave them folded on the seat, so that they won't be wrinkled later when they're needed. She finds her purse, shoved under the seat near her ankles, and fishes out her cellphone. Its screen glows brightly in the dim, tinted sunlight of the car interior, showing one resolute little bar instead of the usual pyramid. She sighs and dials the plant's number anyway. She only needs a connection for a few seconds, long enough to get out the words "Tony Stark" and "running late." But she doesn't get much more than a ring and a half before an answering-machine voice cuts in to tell her that there isn't adequate service in her area.

She gets out of the car, ignoring the way her right leg is a minefield of pins and needles, and skirts around the edge until she finds Tony and Happy, shoulder-to-shoulder, peering under the hood. They both straighten up as she draws near. Tony's hands are already smudge with brown grease, there's a brown thumbprint near his nose, and even though he's pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, they're streaked as well. In the back of her mind, Pepper thinks, _I only left you alone for two minutes!_

"We've got no signal," she tells them, waving her phone about as evidence.

Tony digs his own out of his pocket, presses a few buttons, and then bites the tip of his tongue and says, "Huh!" thoughtfully.

Pepper looks at Happy who shrugs. She looks back at Tony and says, "What's wrong with the car?"

Tony glances down at the car as if he'd momentarily forgotten it was there. "Crack in the radiator," he says.

"Can you fix it?"

He snorts. "Of course! Just let me get the elastic band from the glove compartment. Then as long as one of you has a paper clip and some floss, we are golden."

_Sarcasm_, she thinks, _ha ha ha_.

Tony closes the hood with one hand and then braces both of them on it, leaning into his palms and giving her that sidelong grin that Pepper has never quite been able to decode. It either means that the next joke is for her ears only, something just between the two of them, or that the next joke will be entirely at her expense.

"Confusing me with MacGyver again, Potts?" he says. "Tut, tut. I am awesome, but I am not that awesome."

She puts her hands on her hips, which is not easy or particularly comfortable with her cellphone still gripped in one hand. "Focus, please," she says.

In response, Tony only grins and wipes his forehead with a sleeve, making it smudgy too. He pushes away from the car, clapping his hands together, and says, "Okay, here's the plan."

\---

There's a fairly complicated discussion about who should stay with the car and who should walk to the nearest gas station, some five miles back, just outside of Minburn. Happy votes that he and Pepper go, and Tony votes that _he_ and Pepper go, and Pepper occasionally interrupts to remind everyone that she is the one wearing heels, so can't she just stay with the car?

The argument's conclusion is one of the forgone kind, however, because Tony can go from Tony, the guy who lets his employees call him by his first name, to Mr. Anthony Stark in the blink of an eye, as easily as other people change shirts or brands of toothpaste, and when he does there's no point arguing anymore. So Happy gives up before long, patting the car on the hood as if he's saying "I guess it's just you and me, darling."

As she and Tony head down the road, Pepper glances back once and sees Happy settling back into the driver's seat with a two-month-old issue of Esquire, the one that has the article about Tony dog-eared. Pepper knows this because she's the one who's been carrying it around all this time, always meaning to read it and never getting around to it.

She kind of hates most of the press Tony gets. Mostly this is because the press Tony gets tends to be shallow: one journalist's interpretation of Tony Stark, distilled and respun for a highly specific audience. So, when Wired does a profile, it's all about how Tony's re-energizing the flagging high-tech sector. When its People, the story is all about who he's dating this week. When it's The Economist, it's a half-caustic, half-earnest love letter disguised as a run-down of Stark Industries' latest crazy venture. And so on. Pepper has lived in Tony's back pocket for years now, nearly a full decade, and she knows that no one has ever captured the complete picture, not even close.

She's not used to the way she shows up in these stories either. It's weird to read about herself when she stills thinks of herself as the girl who graduated at the top of her high school class and worked evenings at her dad's hardware store. And yet, "Virginia Potts, Stark's personal assistant," the articles all say, as if that's her real full name, "has been with the company since the days of Howard Stark." Then there will be the inevitable bland quote from her about how wonderful Tony is, and the article will move on. Pepper would never say it out-loud, but she's always privately felt that she deserves more than two sentences in the chronicles of Tony Stark's life.

Fifteen minutes down the road, Pepper starts to get really annoyed with her shoes. Her toes feel cramped and sweaty against her nylons. Her arches ache a little bit more with every step. The corn walls on either side seem to tower over them without providing any real shade, leaving her and Tony exposed to the early afternoon sun. They are officially late for the ceremony, no one knows where they are – including them – and _god_, she really hates Iowa some days.

She notices Tony looking at her three seconds later and has to swallow the urge to snap at him.

"Are you limping?" he asks, eyebrows raised in something approaching genuine surprise.

"These aren't walking shoes," she replies, and it's a close call, but she doesn't think she sounds whiny. "I did say that."

"You did?"

It's a rhetorical question. Tony is staring at her feet, appraisingly, and Pepper almost wishes her shoes were more spectacular to look at: red instead of sober black, for example, or high stilettos instead of only middling-high, sort of chunky heels. But then again, Tony has seen – dated actually – a thousand supermodels in a thousand five-inch red stilettos, so Pepper has always felt that that sort of competition is pointless.

Not that she's competing at _all_, in any form.

Tony holds out his hand. Pepper looks from it to Tony's face a few times in confusion before Tony says, "Your shoes, Ms. Potts."

"Why do you want my shoes?" she asks. In response, Tony just makes grabbing motions with his fingers until Pepper sighs, wiggles her feet out of the shoes, and leans over to pick up them up. The road feels almost painfully hot under her toes, but it's a relief as well to have her feet flat and her heels on solid ground.

She hands the shoes over to Tony who, surprisingly, shucks off his own shoes and nods at them. "You wear them for a while," he says, "then we'll switch back."

His shoes are polished so thoroughly that the glare coming off of them is bright white. They're approximately five full sizes too big for her, and that's likely to lead to blisters just as bad as any she might receive from walking barefoot on a burning highway. She looks up to point this out, but Tony is already walking again, and she is forced to hurriedly stuff her feet into the shoes, which are still warm from his body heat but dry and unexpectedly well-cushioned too, and jog to catch up.

As she clomps after him, Tony calls back, head tilted toward the sky, "Try walking a mile in my shoes, Potts. I dare you."

\---

Over the years, Pepper has been approached by four different publisher's to write the tell-all story of what it is like being Tony Stark's personal assistant. This procession of enthusiastic but formal phone calls all come with an offer of really exorbitant sums of money that makes Pepper blush and stammer before politely turning them down. Tony has mostly laughed when she tells him about these calls – usually in the morning, after he's had his first coffee but before he's settled down to read the important bits of mail she's picked out for him.

"You should do it," he'll say, fingers sorting through contracts and blueprints and speech drafts on autopilot. "It'll be the smash comedic hit of the season. Like, _The Devil Wears Prada_ meets _The Great Gatsby_ meets _The Paper Bag Princess_."

And she'll say, trying not to laugh, "And you are who in that analogy?"

And he'll look up, face screwed into mock offence and hands stilling in the papers momentarily, and say, "The princess, of course."

Pepper thinks she probably knows Tony better than anyone else in the world, but she also thinks that there is a distinct and sometimes unbridgeable line between knowing someone better and knowing someone _well_. Tony can be perplexing and changeable like seasons and traffic lights. He has a thousand variations, specific personas for specific people and situations, and Pepper can picture him switching between these different Tonys as circumstances warrant, like they're all experimental prototypes, none of them really complete.

So Pepper might know work-Tony and public-Tony, four-in-the-morning, just-off-a-red-eye from-China Tony, looped-up-on-caffeine Tony and pulled-low-by-alcohol Tony. But even she hasn't seen them all. She doesn't know the Tony who disappears for a week every summer to the Bay Area where he, Happy swears to god, barbecues and wears loafers without socks. She doesn't know the Tony that will take a girl to bed, slip his fingers under the straps of her bra, and then forget her name in the morning.

She isn't qualified to write a book about him, maybe a few chapters at best. She thinks, sometimes, that she isn't even qualified to write a book about _herself_, given how tightly and inextricably her life has twined with Tony Stark's. When she admits to this particular neuroses, in the vaguest terms, he always smiles, lacing his fingers together in front of his chest and tilting his head to one side as if all this problem needs is a change of perspective.

"I don't know, Potts," he will say. "I'd read it."

And she never knows how to respond to that.

\---

They reach the gas station well into the fifth shoe rotation. It's very small, two pumps and a strip of building barely large enough for both a cash register and a candy rack. There's a little Mom-and-Pop diner next door with a white sandwich board out front, advertising hot sandwiches, two soups of the day, and about twelve different varieties of pie.

A guy comes out of the gas station to greet them. He has close-cropped white hair and a sun-tan that stops at his elbows. He gives them a couple of up-and-down looks, particularly at Pepper who feels she must look rumpled and fatigued in her silk blouse and pencil skirt when compared to Tony's oil-smeared shirtsleeves and unbuttoned collar. Then, he asks, "Car trouble?"

"Yes," says Tony in brisk, business tones. "Crack in the radiator. Do you have sealer, oil, and water?"

The guy looks impressed, as people usually do when Tony is being serious about things. He thinks about it for a moment, rubbing his smooth chin with his right hand. "Oil and water we can do, of course," he says, "but we sold our last tube of Seal-It to some tourist two days ago and haven't got a new shipment.

Pepper sighs, and Tony swears quietly under his breath. For all his laissez-faire attitude and deep dislike of ceremonial functions, Pepper knows that Tony had decided that today's is important: the successful first joint venture between Stark and Fujikawa Industries, an olive branch finally extended after a long, hostile and dysfunctional relationship. _And also a chance to impress Rumiko Fujikawa_, Pepper thinks, _musn't forget that_.

The gas station guy's eyes are bright and friendly, however. "Hey, if you two can wait a half-hour, I can have my nephew pick some up from my place," he says. "He'll even give you a lift back to your car, no extra charge."

This, Pepper feels, is the best news they've had all day. Tony must agree because the strained expression brewing between his eyebrows disappears, and he starts to nod.

"I could use something to eat while we wait," he says and jerks a thumb toward the diner. "This place any good?"

The guy shrugs, a heavy up and down like he's lifting lead weights rather than shoulders. "It'll fill you up, and the pie isn't bad," he says.

"Good enough," says Tony.

While the gas station guy disappears back into the store to give instructions to his nephew and Tony heads off to get a table, Pepper stands between the two buildings and tries her phone again. This time, she manages to get through to Diane, the plant's admin, long enough to explain what's happened.

"We'll be another hour at best," she says.

"I dunno," Diane replies, her voice crackly and indistinct, "that'll be cutting it close. We're already running low on bagels. There could be riots."

Pepper hangs up, shoves her cellphone back into her purse, and goes to find Tony in the diner. He's staked out in a booth near the windows, one arm stretched out along the red plastic seat and the other balanced neatly on the window sill. Two laminated menus are on the table when Pepper sits down; they have a map of Minburn on the front and arrows pointing to different locations, accompanied by small ads for whatever that particular arrow is pointing to. Pepper picks one up and scans it for something that is not deep-fried.

To their right, there's a TV over an old wood bar, playing a baseball game that Pepper knows to be a re-run. Three guys are at the bar, watching it intently anyway. A family of four is gathered around one the free-floating tables in the middle of the room, Dad feeding a baby in a booster seat while Mom tries convince her son to use a napkin.

 

Their waitress appears before too long, a skinny teenage girl with thick, expressive eyebrows and a shiny ponytail. She walks over to them, order pad already in hand and pen poised. "Can I get you something to drink?" she asks.

"Ice tea," says Pepper, craving something cold and caffeinated and sweet.

Tony smiles the smile that he reserves for pretty, under-aged girls, flirtatious in a harmless sort of way. Pepper secretly hopes that one day they will meet a teenage girl who'll be able to spot how universally not-harmless Tony Stark is and who'll run for the hills. Like most girls her age, however, the waitress just blushes the same colour as her lip gloss and smiles back.

"Beer?" asks Tony. "Do you have beer?"

The girl rattles off a long list of their different beers – tap, draft and imported – which Pepper misses due to being too occupied staring disapprovingly at Tony. He picks one, and the girl disappears with another smile, and Pepper continues to stare.

"What?" Tony demands, in response to her expression. "I think I deserve a beer."

Pepper wants to say "I think you're an alcoholic," except she really does, so it wouldn't be very funny. Instead she says, "Nothing" and turns to watch the baseball game.

Her dad used to take her to baseball games, mostly as a treat, on family vacations to New York or Chicago. For a long time, Pepper thought this was a sign that her dad always wanted a son not a daughter but now she thinks, it was probably just because he was a guy that thought girls could enjoy baseball too.

Tony doesn't really like baseball, except in an esoteric way that involves it being more of a symbol of American unity and goodness than as an actual sport. He's the kind of person who knows the batting averages of all the famous players but only watches a handful of games a year and never actually goes to any. Pepper isn't actually sure if Tony likes _any_ sports, although she did catch him watching Robots Wars one time, very late at night, when they were both working over-time. But, she thinks with a mental sniff, that's not really a _sport_.

Yet Tony's the one who yells, "Can you turn that up?" causing all three men at the bar to turn around and give him the same confused expression, like "Who the hell actually wants to _listen_ to baseball commentators?"

"Could you try to keep a low profile?" Pepper asks, unfolding her paper napkin and putting it on her lap. "We're lucky that no one's recognized you yet. People don't like you in the Midwest."

Tony turns back to her with wide, injured eyes. "Everybody likes me."

She snorts softly. "Obadiah spent most of the last few years closing your factories in the Midwest," she says. "Also, you're an urban corporate capitalist, and you're smug. They don't like you."

He seems to digest this slowly, leaning forward on the table and twisting his mouth to one side. Finally, he says, "Oh, right. I forgot about that."

Their waitress returns with their drinks and then bustles off again with their orders: a cheeseburger for Tony, a club sandwich for Pepper. Tony continues to pretend to watch baseball while Pepper rearranges her cutlery and feels vague guilt that they didn't order something-to-go for Happy. She resolves to buy him a Snickers bar from the gas station before they head out.

By the time their meals arrive, massive heaps of french fries covering a good two-thirds of each plate, Tony has taken to drumming his fingers on the sill and humming something that sounds like an off-tune "Sweet Home Alabama" under his breath, trying to come off cheerful and folksy as their waitress slips their plates onto the table, blushes again, and tucks stray hair behind her ear.

_Wrong state_, Pepper thinks sourly, plucking the toothpicks out of her sandwich.

Pepper sometimes believes that Tony _is_ like the Paper Bag Princess, only inverted. That somewhere deep-down there is a Tony Stark (Mach I) who's been covered up by well-tailored suits and a profound self-awareness of exactly how clever and charming he can be but in that deep-down place, he is otherwise a basically normal, decent person, trying to make something great out of himself and the world around him.

Pepper's had to hold onto this idea for a long time to keep doing what she's doing, to have kept from quitting in outrage so many times over the years. Now, she watches Tony take such a huge, joyful bite out of his burger that ketchup spills out the side and over his thumb, and she thinks that it is getting easier to believe every day.

\---

The gas station guy's nephew is named Franklin, but he insists that they call him F.

"What, you mean the letter?" asks Tony, and Franklin nods his chubby, bald head and looks at Tony with such undisguised admiration that Pepper suspects he will be spending the next two months carefully cultivating a goatee. Tony shrugs, "Okay, cool. Whatever."

Tony pays the gas station guy, thanks him for his help, and then they pile into F's old Chrysler and head off down the road. Tony's riding shot-gun, so Pepper has the entire back-seat to herself, except for a pile of old newspapers on the floor to her left. The windows are wide open, and F's radio is tuned to some contemporary alternative channel that Tony is being polite enough not to roll his eyes over.

Pepper keeps checking her watch because it makes her feel like their accomplishing more than if she stares out the window and tries to judge speed or distance based on endless, identical fields. She only stops when Tony catches her eye in the rear-view mirror and makes his _Quit being a buzzkill_ face. She responds with her _You'd be panhandling for change on the streets of San Diego if I wasn't like this_ look but stops anyway.

For the whole ride, Tony fires questions at F, ranging from inane stuff like "Can it really be called a soup of the day if there are two of them? I mean, doesn't that violate the basic principle?" to more pointed questions about the health of Minburn's economy and the demographics of its potential workforce. F alternates between laughing enthusiastically and giving uncomfortable explanations about how things haven't been too great for Minburn in the last few years. Between the cost of gas and the cost of food and most of the big companies, like Stark Industries, packing up and getting the hell out, even kids who want to stay in small-town Iowa have had to leave to look for work. He says, if things keep going this way, Minburn's gonna dry up completely, get forgotten and erased from the map.

Tony listens to these answers with his slightly-narrowed eye stare, and Pepper can practically hear the chug of his brain as he processes this new information, adds it to the old, tries to think of way to make this better, to fix this, to make the Midwest _like_ him.

When they arrive back at the car, Happy is sitting on the trunk, tearing a corn leaf into thin strips. He jumps off and comes over to greet them, but Tony shoos him away with an irritated flap of one hand.

"Stop staring at my car like that, F. I feel very objectified," says Tony and then in the next breath, he is all business: "Get the water from the trunk and bring it over." Tony heads over to the car himself, already twisting the lid off the tube of Seal-It, and leans into the front seat to pop the hood.

Happy sidles over in Pepper's direction, hands in his pockets. His cheeks are pink from being out in the heat too long, and his eyes have that soft chocolate quality that she can sometimes see when he's looking at her but she's not looking at him, at least not directly.

"He's in a good mood," Happy observes.

"Yes," she says as Tony instructs F in the proper proportions of oil and water necessary to replace radiator fluid, and F patiently doesn't point out that he works at a gas station. "He'll deny it later, of course, but I think he's enjoying himself."

She opens her purse, retrieves a slightly melted Snickers bar and a small bottle of blue Gatorade, and holds them out for Happy. He gives her a look of pure gratitude.

 

"You are the best person I know, Pepper Potts," he says, and she smiles at him in return.

Tony patches up the car in record speed – that is, record speed for normal people – and even helps F carry the empty jugs back to his car. While the boys are busy packing up and cleaning up, or testing the engine in Happy's case, Pepper checks her cellphone out of force of habit and sees that she received one text message from Diane during the 10 minute trip back to the car. It reads, _where are u guys :(_.

When both cars are all loaded up, Tony pulls out his wallet and removes twenty dollars from the fold of bills. He holds the money out to F who stares at it longingly but nonetheless says, "Oh, no. Uncle Jack said this was no charge."

"I know," says Tony, shaking his hand and making the bills wiggle like a fishing lure. "This is for letting me ride shotgun even though Potts is so much prettier than I am."

F's eyes go wide, although whether it is because he secretly agrees with this statement or vehemently disagrees, Pepper cannot quite tell. He takes the money and puffs up with pride as Tony claps him on the shoulder. There's pleased, companionable silence until Happy leans out of the driver-seat window and shouts, "Ready to get going, Mr. Stark?"

At the word "Stark," F's face goes instantly slack, like it's finally melted in all this heat and sun. He says, "_Tony_ Stark?"

Tony keeps his eyes mostly on F, although he spares a quick glance over his shoulder to frown at Happy. F looks torn between shock and wanting to throw a punch. And yes, Tony can take care of himself in a fight – more-so now than ever before – but Pepper takes three quick steps toward them anyway, inserting herself between Tony and F and placing one hand on Tony's chest.

"We're late," she says.

He glances down at her. "That we are." He looks back up at F for just a moment and then allows himself to be shepherded toward the car. When they're inside, he reaches for his computer and boots it back up, as if nothing happened.

Through the back window, Pepper watches F stand there, gaping and fuming, his keys still dangling from one hand, even as they drive further away and he gets smaller and smaller.

"Is he still standing there?" Tony asks after a few minutes, glancing up from his computer screen and though Pepper has to squint a little now, she can still make him out.

"Yes," she says.

"Okay," sighs Tony, "that's kind of creepy."

\---

The bagels _are_ gone by the time they make it to the plant, but the crowd – a mixture of plant employees, journalists, and Fujikawa representatives – cheer anyway as Tony jogs up onto the little half-riser stage. He holds out his hands in combination wave-_calm down_ gesture, and a succession of camera flashes go off predictably.

When the tumult dies down, Tony just stands there for a moment, basking in the attention. Pepper's seen him do this a thousand times, silent when he should be talking, drawing every eye in the room just by _being_. Finally, in measured, confident tones, he starts to speak.

"We set out on this project, two years ago," he begins, and Pepper lets the speech melt to the back of her attention. It's a good speech; she's read it a half-dozen times already and can hear the likely places where Tony will crescendo and fermata without really needing to _hear_ them. So as Tony speaks about the endless pull of progress and the ingenuity that can only rise from a collective, many wills bent towards a single purpose, Pepper very quietly steps out of her shoes once more and stands barefoot on the cold, stone floor. She looks down and wiggles her exhausted toes.

Looking up again, she's surprised to find Tony looking directly at her, over the heads of the entire gathering. His mouth is pressed into a thin, thoughtful line. She holds her breath without intending to.

"So, I've been thinking a lot today," he says, without breaking his gaze. In her peripheral vision, Pepper sees the Fujikawa reps flinch at this sudden detour off the official route, but she doesn't look at them or worry about them; she's too occupied looking at Tony.

"Someone told me today that people in the Midwest don't like me because I'm smug. I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I see you two over there looking uncomfortable, so I'll assume it's not entirely wrong." He pauses and shifts uncomfortably himself. "I get that things haven't been easy here, and that the Stark Industries's business plan has been making that worse not better. I'd point out that I haven't really been involved in our business plan in the last few years because I've been busy... being me, but that's an even more valid for you all to hate me, so I won't."

Another pause, and this time Tony looks down. He says, "I just wanted to say sorry about that, and we'll see about doing things better in the future."

There's silence for a moment, except for the quick scritching of pens, trying to take down these words verbatim before their lost from memory, only their basic meaning left behind. Pepper can already picture how CNN's ticker-tape will appear tomorrow: TONY STARK: "SORRY ABOUT THAT."

The applause starts gradually, over in the left corner. It doesn't grow to a thunder, and it certainly isn't a standing ovation. But it's there, and it's more than polite, and Pepper is so proud of Tony.

He clears his throat, raises his eyebrows, and says, "Yeah, so, back on message" and launches back into the prepared speech, exactly where he left off. Only now the people aren't just listening, they are _really listening_.

Pepper thinks that if she were to ever write that tell-all book she'd start with this scene, this bit right here: Tony back-lit, smiling and expounding on the possibilities of the future to a crowd of people, some of whom were there because they have to be and some of whom were there just to be able to say they stood in his presence for five minutes. All of whom now have their faces tilted up toward him.

And then Tony's smile collapses into a playful grimace and he says, "Now get out of here before I remember that I should have fired you all a long time ago."

And Pepper decides that, in the bizarro world where she writes books about Tony Stark, she wouldn't even leave that part out.


End file.
